Non-integrable wavefunctions arise in quantum systems exhibiting chaotic dynamics
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Available literature discusses quantum chaos, wavefunctions, and spectral properties in complex systems, but lacks direct confirmation that non-integrable wavefunctions specifically arise from chaotic dynamics.
We report on the experimental investigation of the properties of the eigenvalues and wavefunctions and the fluctuation properties of the scattering matrix of closed and open billiards, respectively, of which the classical dynamics undergoes a transition from integrable via almost integrable to fully chaotic. To realize such a system, we chose a billiard with a 60° sector shape of which the classical dynamics is integrable, and introduced circular scatterers of varying number, size, and position. The spectral properties of generic quantum systems of which the classical counterpart is either integrable or chaotic are universal and well understood. If, however, the classical dynamics is pseudo-integrable or almost-integrable, they exhibit a non-universal intermediate statistics, for which analytical results are known only in a few cases, e.g., if it corresponds to semi-Poisson statistics. Since the latter is, above all, clearly distinguishable from those of integrable and chaotic systems, our aim was to design a billiard with these features which indeed is achievable by adding just one scatterer of appropriate size and position to the sector billiard. We demonstrated that, while the spectral properties of almost-integrable billiards are sensitive to the classical dynamics, this is not the case for the distribution of the wavefunction components, which was analyzed in terms of the strength distribution, and the fluctuation properties of the scattering matrix which coincide with those of typical, fully chaotic systems.
Quantum chaos in many-body systems provides a bridge between statistical and quantum physics with strong predictive power. This framework is valuable for analyzing properties of complex quantum systems such as energy spectra and the dynamics of thermalization. While contemporary methods in quantum chaos often rely on random ensembles of quantum states and Hamiltonians, this is not reflective of most real-world systems. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective: across a wide range of examples, a single non-random quantum state is shown to encode universal and highly random quantum state ensembles. We characterize these ensembles using the notion of quantum state $k$-designs from quantum information theory and investigate their universality using a combination of analytic and numerical techniques. In particular, we establish that $k$-designs arise naturally from generic states as well as individual states associated with strongly interacting, time-independent Hamiltonian dynamics. Our results offer a new approach for studying quantum chaos and provide a practical method for sampling approximately uniformly random states; the latter has wide-ranging applications in quantum information science from tomography to benchmarking.
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